Dawn Gorman believes poetry should be everywhere - puts it on beermats, uses it to
work with people with memory loss, facilitates writing workshops, organises poetry
events and runs international poetry competitions. She is widely published, and has
performed in New York, Paris, London - and lots of smaller places in between.

“Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket;
you put your life into it and make something out of that.” Mary Oliver

Countdown to Peace

Melksham Remembers

A Century's Memories

Practice, Place and Purpose

Floral Feast - Poet in Residence

Poet-in-Residence, Beached, Stoke-on-Trent

Europe Meets Japan - film

Arctic Convoys Project

Beached

The Iron Duke Returns

Poet in Residence at Greenhill Cottage Gallery

Unexpected Excesses

Wiltshire at War: Community Stories

The Now in Then: Contemporary Writing from History project

The Watercycle Project with The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment

Martin Malone, left, Simon McNeill-Ritchie, and Dawn Gorman, at the event The Poets' War at St Margaret's Hall, Bradford on Avon, on November 8th 2018.

Countdown to Peace

In the autumn of 2018, I worked on several strands of the Bradford on Avon initiative Countdown to Peace, which staged numerous events in and around the town to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War. I worked with residents at Wiltshire Heights Care Home in Bradford on Avon, running aural history sessions to capture their community and family First World War memories, which I wrote up for each resident and which were subsequently printed and turned into an attractive booklet by the care home staff. I read out some of these anecdotes at one of the celebrations' key events, The Poets' War, which I devised, co-ordinated and ran at St Margarets Hall in the town on Thursday November 8th. At this ticketed event, there was a poetry reading by Martin Malone, whose PhD delivered WWI poems through today's lens, plus poetry by WWI nurses and soldiers from Cllr Simon McNeill-Ritchie's book Great Ward Poetry, WWI poems by students from St Laurence School, poems by local poets both contemporary and from the WWI era and finally a very lively discussion between Martin and Simon, complete with popular audience Q&A.